Abstract
When a waiter asks you for money at the end of a meal, how does your brain understand that it is the food you are paying for? Similar relationships are everywhere in the world and understanding them lets our brains choose good behaviours. Our brains contain a model of the relationships between objects and events in the world. What does this model look like? How is it built? When we come across a new problem, how can we fit it into to our current model? I will talk about current research in this area with a focus on exciting recent findings about what is going on during rest and sleep. When you are sleeping, or even sitting down for a cup of tea, your brain is not resting. It is busy updating and reorganising your model of the world. Finding shortcuts through your knowledge, making new inferences from your experiences. I will show some of the most interesting data in this emerging field of understanding.
